In this paper, we continue our investigations of "web spam": the injection of artificially-created pages into the web in order to influence the results from search engines, to drive traffic to certain pages for fun or profit. This paper considers some previously-undescribed techniques for automatically detecting spam pages, examines the effectiveness of these techniques in isolation and when aggregated using classification algorithms. When combined,

Two years ago, we conducted a study on the evolution of web pages over time. In the course of that study, we discovered a large number of machine-generated "spam" web pages emanating from a handful of web servers in Germany. These spam web pages were dynamically assembled by stitching together grammatically well-formed German sentences drawn from a large collection of sentences. This discovery motivated us to develop techniques for finding other instances of such "slice and dice" generation of web pages, where pages are automatically generated by stitching together phrases drawn from a limited corpus. We applied these techniques to two data sets, a set of 151 million web pages collected in December 2002 and a set of 96 million web pages collected in June 2004. We found a number of other instances of large-scale phrase-level replication within the two data sets. This paper describes the algorithms we used to discover this type of replication, and highlights the results of our data mining.

How fast does the web change? Does most of the content remain unchanged once it has been authored, or are the documents continuously updated? Do pages change a little or a lot? Is the extent of change correlated to any other property of the page? All of these questions are of interest to those who mine the web, including all the popular search engines, but few studies have been performed to date to answer them. One notable exception is a study by Cho and Garcia-Molina, who crawled a set of 720,000 pages on a daily basis over four months, and counted pages as having changed if their MD5 checksum changed. They found that 40% of all web pages in their set changed within a week, and 23% of those pages that fell into the .com domain changed daily. This paper expands on Cho and Garcia-Molina's study, both in terms of coverage and in terms of sensitivity to change. We crawled a set of 150,836,209 HTML pages once every week, over a span of 11 weeks. For each page, we recorded a checksum of the page, and a feature vector of the words on the page, plus various other data such as the page length, the HTTP status code, etc. Moreover, we pseudo-randomly selected 0.1% of all of our URLs, and saved the full text of each download of the corresponding pages. After completion of the crawl, we analyzed the degree of change of each page, and investigated which factors are correlated with change intensity. We found that the average degree of change varies widely across top-level domains, and that larger pages change more often and more severely than smaller ones. This paper describes the crawl and the data transformations we performed on the logs, and presents some statistical observations on the degree of change of different classes of pages.

We describe side conversations, a new facility we have added to the Argo telecollaboration system. Side conversations allow subgroups of teleconference participants to whisper to each other. The other participants can see who is whispering to whom, but cannot hear what is being said.

Members of geographically distributed work groups often complain of a feeling of isolation and of not knowing "who is around". Argohalls attempt to solve this problem by integrating video icons, clustered into groups representing physical hallways, into the Argo telecollaboration system. Argo users can "hang out" in hallways in order to keep track of the co-workers on their projects, and they can roam other hallways to "run into" whoever happens to be there.